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Comment by Killah911 | Hacker News Reader

I've read "On Intelligence" too and I think Jeff Hawkings is onto something. However your argument:

>>"The fact that nobody seems interested in acquiring them sends the signal that they probably are no better than anybody else building AI tools"

Seriously? The bar to being successful is an acquisition offer from Google? I'd understand if money was the driving factor. But Jeff Hawkings has already made a bunch of that from his previous ventures and to me at least, it seems that he's genuinely passionate about building something extraordinary. So, I'm still rooting for Numeta.

In the SV bubble the measure of success may be getting "acquired", but I hope Numeta is more about actually creating some groundbreaking advancements in AI & not just getting acquired.

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>>Seriously? The bar to being successful is an acquisition offer from Google? I'd understand if money was the driving factor. But Jeff Hawkings has already made a bunch of that from his previous ventures and to me at least, it seems that he's genuinely passionate about building something extraordinary. So, I'm still rooting for Numeta.<<

The thing is, Since On Intelligence came out I haven't really seen any real products from them. Sure, they created some tools that they expect other developers to build projects on top of them but that is it. Honestly, with all his talks claiming how his algorithms are much better than the current state of the art I would expect really good image recognition, speech recognition or something like IBM's Watson to come out of their labs. But everything I've seen from them seems average. Not that much better than the state of the art.

If they had anything groundbreaking and I were google, I'd want to acquire that technology to further the goal of Strong AI. Google is interested in producing AI and will acquire anybody that can help it with that goal. Google is not interested in Numenta's technology, and I'm sure they've checked their technology, which makes me think that Numenta doesn't really have much to offer.

Whether Jeff is interested in selling or not is irrelevant.

Frankly, I'm not sure why you think you even know if there have or have not been offers, or what sorts of problems they are actually solving. A lack of media screaming and investor drum banging means absolutely nothing.

Good point. I do not know if there have been, or not, any offers. What I do know is that their technology so far is not impressive, it is pretty average.

Google hired recently Ray Kurzweil as director of engineering. Ray's recent book - "How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed" - is influenced heavily by the ideas from the first generation of Numenta's technology (via Dileep George). So, you could say that Google is following Numenta to some degree. Jeff Hawkins is always careful about setting expecetations and tries avoid as much hype as possible. The progress was indeed slower than what some people imagined it to be, but it is a very hard problem . Now, Numenta has Grok and its technology will be tested in the field. It also released NuPIC as open source, which will let anyone interested to dive in, run benchmarks, etc.

In all honestly though, the Google founders were Ray Kurzweil fans before he wrote the "How to create a mind" (which is book that's a whole another discussion altogether). I would be really surprised if there weren't already some interest and some back and forth between Numeta and others in the AI field. It's really about goals, and if goals align then "acquisitions" might make sense. But it is far from a marker of success. There are plenty of acu-hires to prove that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4y43qwS8fl4 - Jeff Hawkins recent talk at Google with Kurzweil in the audience asking questions.

> Since On Intelligence came out I haven't really seen any real products from them

They absolutely have a commercial venture going: https://www.groksolutions.com/

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